Stefan Collini

Humankind,​ he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of his life, T.S. Eliot was a man on the run, retreating to actual or symbolic boltholes, wearing a succession of masks, relying on routine to help him escape detection – even, it sometimes seemed,...

Biographies​ of scholars often struggle to do justice to their subjects’ scholarship. Describing the slow, patient exploration of evidence and the stuttering formulation of interpretations need not be as exciting as watching paint dry, but scholarship remains an activity that is hard to communicate and nigh impossible to render in dramatic terms. The temptation is strong to concentrate...

When​ did the ‘modern’ era begin? For the European imagination across more than a millennium, the most significant divide was between antiquity and what followed, such that for some centuries ‘modern history’ was held to have begun with the fall of Rome. Applying a different filter, the category of the ‘Middle Ages’ indicated the post-Renaissance sense of...

Every so often​, a periodical comes along that sets the pace for a number of years thanks to the decisiveness of its editorial direction and the quality of its contributions. In 1855 the arrival of a new weekly journal represented one such transformative moment. The Saturday Review addressed itself to ‘serious, thoughtful men of all schools, classes and principles’,...

Have Britain​’s leading intellectuals all been related to one another? While the answer to the question in that bald form is clearly no, a suspicion persists that in the past 150 years a higher proportion of intellectual figures of note in this country have been interconnected by ties of blood and marriage than has been the case elsewhere. It is not easy to turn this suspicion into a...